President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court this week to throw out the $83.3 million defamation verdict E. Jean Carroll won against him, arguing the statements behind it were official presidential acts protected by immunity.
Robert Giuffra and Michael Martinich-Sauter, Trump’s lawyers, filed the petition Tuesday. Its core argument comes from the Supreme Court’s own 2024 immunity decision, which shields presidents from liability for official acts and, in the justices’ own words, covers “most of a President’s public communications.”
Trump made the statements in 2019, while in office, denying Carroll’s claim that he had sexually assaulted her in a department store dressing room decades earlier.
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His filing calls the case “the first case in our nation’s history” in which courts have made a sitting or former president pay damages for conduct in office, and warns that letting the verdict stand would leave future presidents afraid to act boldly for fear of similar lawsuits.
A three-judge panel at the Second US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict last year, calling the damages “fair and reasonable” and finding Trump had waited too long to raise his immunity claim. Judges on the full appeals court refused to reconsider that ruling in April. Judge Denny Chin, an Obama appointee, wrote that Trump raised no immunity defense “for the first three years of this case.”
The Justice Department has now joined Trump’s personal legal team in the appeal, while Carroll’s lawyers declined to comment on the petition. The court has not yet docketed the case.
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This is Trump’s second trip to the Supreme Court over Carroll’s claims. In a separate case tied to New York’s Adult Survivors Act, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll and awarded her $5 million in 2023. The justices declined to hear his appeal of that verdict earlier this year, and Carroll has since collected more than $5.6 million with interest.
Read: E. Jean Carroll Receives $5.6 Million From Trump
